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“Why do I run when no one can escape you? Why hide when you’ve found me a hundred times?
I thought I could lose you in a crowd of people. But you find me even in crowds of secrets, even behind my own masks.”

“They call the wide-eyed flower jasmine.
They call the wide-eyed flower a thorn.
The wide-eyed flower doesn’t care what they call it.
I adore that freedom. I bow to it.”

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.”

“…as I watched I found a new thought in myself. I am embarrassed to tell it, so rudimentary it seems, like an infant’s discovery that her hand is her own. But that is what I was then, an infant. And the thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.”

“…I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

“Although the unimaginative see life as a thread stretched from one point to another, birth to death, a life truly lived is a glorious tangle. One is never lost. And if one is lucky, one is never found, either.”

“Of course it’ll never happen, and it sounds so basic, I’m almost sure that if I had a chance to play in that particular sandbox, I’d grow bored of it in two weeks. But maybe I wouldn’t? Mundane things can feel so exotic when your entire life has been one plot twist after another.”

“There is a crazy-wild delight that comes over you when you discover something new, something extraordinary. If you try to share that and people look at you blankly, it’s crushing. But if there’s someone else there to say really?! and take fire with enthusiasm alongside you—well, that will keep you going for a long time.”

“I was a child with a child’s attention span. Many adults think this is no more than a butterfly’s, flittering from thought to thought, but they have forgotten how, in some children, it is as sharp and pointed as a stiletto. Mine was focused now.”

“Being Sparrow’s friend has taught me that if you want something badly enough, you must pursue it, regardless of what people say. Even if I’m not successful, I can at least try. Failing makes me end up at the same spot that not trying does, so why not try? I have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

“Even when you think you have nothing, you are rich in imagination and more wealthy if you’re creative. That is the key to a happy, content life. At least I think so.”

“I find stories perfectly thrilling. Whole worlds opened to you, even made-up ones. The possibilities are endless in stories. You’re not bound by time or money or connections or the logistics of travel or unromantic things like paperwork and applications. Anything can be made a reality.”

“The angel of death comes to us and says, ‘You see everything that exists here is mine; it is not yours. Your house, your spouse, your children, your car, your career, your money — everything is mine and I can take it away when I want to, but for now you can use it.’”

“Volleyball gave me freedom. It freed me from the constant urge to prove myself. It freed me from the crushing weight of always having to be the best in the hopes that the rest of the world might see my value. It gave me time to do something for the pure joy of it. And it gave me the chance to see my own value without demanding that others see it, too.”

“His chosen kin could tell him how deserving he was until his horns splintered, but there was something insidious about insecurity sown during youth. The roots were deep. They burrowed into young spongy bone and grew alongside their host, hardening and aging until there was no distinguishing between what was natural and what was planted.”

“This was your idea,” Faithful reminded her, “When will you learn to leave well enough alone?” Alanna sighed. “When I want to stop learning, I guess.”

“Have you ever noticed that when you try to deny some part of yourself, things fall out so you need that part more than any other?”

“He nods at me without me saying a word, giving and giving and giving to his brother without question or judgment, giving everything he can to him, as though he is attempting to fill a void. He’d give everything to me as well. Even in my panicked state, I can’t deny it now with him lying here with me. He’d give everything until he had nothing left for himself, I’m sure of it.”

“One step at a time. One moment into the next. That was all I could do.”

"Nothing, if done with the right person, was like a balm for the soul."

“The amount of times I’ve thought buying plants might make a difference in my life is staggering.”

“She’d forgo a proper bed, a proper kitchen, a proper house, just to be able to bathe in heat when she wanted. There was a chance she’d never leave the tub.”

“I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing.”

“I think there’s something beautiful about being lucky enough to witness a thing on its way out.”

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”